Attention Atlas Obscura readers and readers of Atlas Obscura!
TL;DR we’re starting a book club and we want you to join! I’m very excited to announce the start of the Atlas Obscura Book Club, an ongoing discussion series where we read a book and discuss it together, exploring questions that the books bring up, and getting experts and authors to join in.
If you’d like to be a part of the Atlas Obscura Book Club, head to the bottom of this thread and switch this conversation from “Normal” to “Watching” to get notifications about upcoming discussions. Or you can simply join in at any time by commenting in the forum discussions as they appear!
The format of the club will be as follows: Roughly once a month we will pick a book, based on suggestions from our community. Each week there will be a discussion thread in the forum, focusing on a portion of the book, and any questions or other conversations that might arise! We’re going to try to bring special guests and other resources to the discussions so that we can all get even more out of our reading experience.
The first book we’re going to be reading is Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s 1990 book, Last Chance to See. The book follows Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and Carwardine, an environmentalist and zoologist, as they travel the world, trying to experience a handful of species on the edge of extinction. As part of a project that spawned television, radio, and other projects for decades after its release, there’s also a lot of other material to explore as we go! A conservation-minded travelogue about rare creatures, written with Adams’ signature humanist wit, Last Chance to See exemplifies the Atlas Obscura spirit in ways that few other books can, and we’re excited to read it along with you. You can buy the book here.
I hope it comes as no surprise that we here at Atlas Obscura are big, dorky book fans, and we’ve wanted to start a book club or reading group for some time. We’ll be starting our first discussion of Last Chance to See on February 20th, covering the first two chapters. Join us won’t you?
Eric and Abi
Book Dorks
